[alokin]

and the US sent a lot of dirty manufacturing to China. A service economy should use less energy than a manufacturing economy (which Europe still is)??

But you are right with all these raw materials.

Distances need energy, but significantly less with a working train system. Let's say your family would be spread out in Spain or Italy, you could but must not use the car in most cases.

[MrBill]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]The most energy-efficient countries

Next year in Copenhagen, world leaders will assemble and attempt to write the successor agreement to the 10-year-old Kyoto protocol. In order for countries to make dramatic reductions for a greener future, energy efficiency will likely be a big part of the equation. What they'll find is a huge gap between countries with a head start, and those still in the blocks.

Not surprising, the countries with the most energy-efficient economies are those who import their energy supplies.
Japan leads the way. It is, after all, birthplace of the Kyoto Protocols for climate change. More important, Japan has very little domestic energy production and is forced to import most of its fuel supply — creating a powerful economic incentive to use those expensive imports efficiently.

The island nation uses 4,500 BTUs per U.S. dollar of gross domestic product, a measure known as "energy intensity," the world standard for measuring how efficient an economy is at using energy.

A country with a very high GDP and relatively little energy consumed is likely to be a very energy-efficient economy. Conversely a country with huge energy consumption and relatively little GDP is unlikely to be efficient. A BTU, or British thermal unit, is the amount of heat energy needed to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit.

Of course, the use of energy intensity as a measure is not perfect and the results can be misleading. By the EIA's data, the country with the lowest energy intensity is Chad. True, Chad uses little energy, but the country is largely reliant on low-tech subsistence farming. Comparing it with the U.S. makes little sense.

So for our Forbes.com list we looked at only the 75 largest countries in terms of total GDP. Not surprisingly, the countries are wealthy and among the world's greenest as well, according to the Environmental Performance Index, a joint product of Columbia University and Yale University, which measures performance against 25 indicators, such as measures of air pollution, water supply or use of natural resources.

Switzerland, which ranks third for efficiency, is ranked as the greenest country. Austria is not far behind at sixth, with Germany and the U.K. also in the top 15.

The most energy-efficient countries are all similar to Japan. In many cases, they do not have access to abundant sources of energy and have sought efficiency as a matter of energy independence — in the case of (No. 2) Denmark as an urgent national priority since the oil shocks of the 1970s. Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel and Italy all make the list as well.

The U.S. doesn't. Using energy intensity as a measure, the U.S. is using slightly more than 9,000 BTUs per dollar of GDP. The top 10 countries use 7,500 BTUs or less. China uses 35,000 BTUs per dollar of GDP.

They're far from the worst, though. At the other end of the scale are former Soviet countries: Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine. Ukraine uses 138,000 BTUs of energy for every dollar of GDP — roughly 30 times the level of consumption in Japan. The aging energy infrastructure of these countries, a remnant from the not-so-efficient days of Soviet planning, has much room for improvement.

A note on sources: Different agencies give different estimates of energy consumption and GDP. For the purposes of our ranking, we looked at data released in October from the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy. The estimates of total primary energy consumption are those of the EIA. For GDP figures, the EIA used data from Global Insight. The October 2007 data is for the year 2005.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008 ... iency.html

[efarmer]

If a tipping point is reached per se, I think it will be only
after a series of pragmatic responses in the way of
personal behavior changes en masse in society fail
to quench a step change in energy / cost relationships
and preserve a viable lifestyle.

We keep anticipating falling off a cliff on this forum.
We may just as well lose our shirts and have to wear
a barrel, and then ride that barrel over Niagara Falls.
Or then again, we might just roll down a very long and
gently sloping hill, barfing all over ourselves.

I do know that every time I expect the bogey man
in the deep dark of the night, I wake up with chigger
bites or poison ivy instead.

efarmer

[bodigami]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Precipice', '[')b](...) It would be a fair task in and of itself to define a living standard which is recognizeably 1st world, but I would say that some of the criteria might be: Just for starters...

[Peleg]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('wisconsin_cur', 'T')here is also the "accident" that we were producing a lot of oil at the time that we were building our model of transportation and the infrastructure to support it. Even today we do better than Europe as far a percentage of energy use produced at home.


So even before taxes the net loss of using energy is less since a larger percentage of that money stays at home. This will only increase because while our own production is in terminal decline I believe the North Sea fields are declining even faster.

We are responsible for (among other things) our failure to tax oil appropriately but it is an "accident" of economics and geology that we had so much to begin with and the effects of that abundance upon how we decided to organize our national transportation scheme.

[Kingcoal]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('skeptik', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Precipice', 'H')i all,

Many a time I have read about how western Europe manages to get by on about half the oil consumption per capita as the US, and in many ways (west) Europeans generally have living standards which are slightly better than their US cousins. This curious situation has me wondering: what might the correlation be between average living standards and oil consumption per capita in a given country??

[nobodypanic]

how much unemployment can the US take? there's a tipping point.

i don't know the answer, but it seems to me that at some point the pain will be enough to cause a violent dislocation of the established social power structures.

revolution calling.